Perfect Dark (XBLA) – Review

Nostalgia is a tricky beast. In the world of videogames, it can feel like gamers constantly wear stylish pairs of rose-tinted spectacles when eulogising about classic retro titles. For instance, I’ve never fully understood the amount of love and respect that Bond-themed N64 FPS Goldeneye received back in the day, and continues to receive now. For a single-platform gamer, someone who’d never had any previous exposure to the genre on PCs, I can almost understand the sentiment as it predated a lot of first person shooters that effectively set down the ground rules.

Perfect Dark doesn’t have that excuse though. Ten years ago it had been preceeded by some of the greatest first person games ever written, from Half Life to Quake 2 to Unreal via Deus Ex. Looking at Perfect Dark XBLA as a polished up N64 title is really the only way to look at it. Like a house made of tissue paper, the whole thing collapses in on itself the moment you start to compare it with everything that came out afterwards, and certainly anything that currently exists elsewhere on the Xbox 360 (or any other current generation gaming platform).

Rare took the basic elements from Goldeneye, replaced Bond with a sexy super-spy, Joanna Dark, and built a game around a classic storyline of corporate greed, alien artifacts and artificial intelligence.

We first encounter Dark’s world through her eyes as she picks up her first assignments. The first couple of levels serve as a gentle introduction to the controls and different weapons types you’ll find during the gameplay. Rather neatly for a first-person game, each “chapter” you play (as a series of mission assignments) can be replayed to try and better your time and in-game stats. Of course, on LIVE that means being able to measure your quickest play-throughs against other LIVE players and your friends list for online bragging rights.

Developers 4J Studios have polished up the original N64 game with better textures, some new meshes but in all other respects the game is pretty much a straight and faithful port. Unfortunately that means that all of the annoyances and poor level designs of the original are still intact but for veteran Perfect Dark players, you’ll at least be on familiar ground and have no problem at all in whipping through each assignment in double-quick time. To be fair to 4J, they’ve tightened up the frame rates, improved the visuals a fair amount and have managed to make the block-butted Joanna Dark a little more svelte.

Structurally though, Perfect Dark lacks the sophistication and features that we’ve come to expect from first-person shooter games. There’s no map, there’s no clever checkpointing and in some levels there’s very little visual indication of what the hell you’re supposed to be interacting with. The game’s full of daft little blind alleys and red herrings that show Rare had plenty of skill in wringing reasonable results out of the low-end innards of the N64, but had absolutely no skill in producing decent level designs. The few puzzles and tasks that extend beyond shooting everything and everyone are simplistic chores, and it’s only when you substantially ramp up the game’s difficulty levels that you’ll break a sweat playing through each section. What’s more, 4J Studios have been a little bit too efficient in the conversion, carrying across an extremely twitchy “fine aim” mode that does not translate well to the 360′s more sensitive and shorter-travel analogue sticks. One particular mission where you’re required to quickly aim at and kill two enemy guards in a timely fashion takes far longer than it should as you wrestle to keep the target reticule lined up on an enemy. What’s worse is that there’s no way to tune this in the game’s control options screen.

The game does have a few neat tricks up its sleeve in some places though. Joanna’s various gadgets and the weapons in the game are quite innovative at times, particularly when you place the game in its original timeframe and context. The controls and the auto-aim work particularly well, and there’s still something quite grisly and satisfying about plugging an enemy with a silenced pistol, watching their reaction as they clutch whatever part of their body you just put a bullet in.

As with Goldeneye before it, Perfect Dark won a lot of fans through its multiplayer modes and once again you’ll be able to huddle round a 4-way split screen for local multiplayer deathmatches, or play in co-op or competitive modes on Xbox Live. Multiplayer might feel unsophisticated and once again lacking in the sort of modes and perks we’ve all been spoiled with in the last ten years since Perfect Dark first appeared, but for a lot of console gamers this was where they cut their multiplayer teeth and a fair few people will still have a deep-rooted fondness for PD’s rather quirky multiplayer. It’s fun for a few rounds but it feels woefully shallow, particularly if you’re dipping into this between frenzied bouts of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The XBLA version of Perfect Dark is 800 points, and it’s a nice solid enough conversion job. It raises an interesting question about other titles from the same era, and whether they’d be ripe for a HD revival (I seriously would love to see Rare revisit their classic N64 vehicle basher Blast Corps). There are a few neat XBLA-specific additions like the chance to win Avatar clothing and items, and of course the integration with online scoreboards and achievements, but the game absolutely has to be taken in context. As a retro title it cannot stand up to any comparison to other current FPS games on the Xbox 360.

For what it’s worth, this is the closest you’ll probably ever get to seeing a Goldeneye-like game on the Xbox Live Arcade, so if you’ve got a burning desire to see whether the gameplay is still as amazing as you thought it was, then this will give you a fair indication. Needless to say, if you’ve still got a lot of fond memories of the original Perfect Dark and your clunky old N64, try the demo at least – you might still love it despite its rather old-fashioned look and feel.

Our rating

6/10